Soul Calibur IV
After some mulling, I finally decided that I should at least dignify Soul Calibur 4 with a rental. Admittedly I am glad that I did rent it, because I would've been angry with myself if I had spent more than the eight dollar rental fee on it. I've had it for about two and a half days now, ordinarily I wouldn't consider that a long enough time to post my thoughts on a game, but let me tell you, there's not much more than two and a half days worth of gameplay in Soul Calibur 4 if you aren't sporting a massive erection at the thought of beating overly aggressive 13-year-olds in slightly laggy online play.
There's no doubt about it: the game is beautiful and developers did not lie when they said that you would be able to see the spots where Ivy's outfit presses into the skin. I might go as far as to say that the game is "stunning" on a high definition television, but I've already been stunned by the graphics in games like Mass Effect, Bioshock, Oblivion and Metal Gear Solid 4. Soul Calibur 4, while an amazingly beautiful game, is not as shockingly beautiful as Soul Caliburs 1 or 3 were, and, admittedly, many of the facial renders are intensely ugly. Many female characters suffer from Talim's Soul Calibur 2 cartoonish face problem.
The arenas - all, like, nine of them (keep in mind that most Soul Caliburs have had one arena for each main character, and doubles of certain arenas to reflect flooding/icing over/night and day/etc) - are beautiful, but are not distractingly beautiful like the arenas of Soul Calibur 3. A distinct lack of variety (levels come in Outdoor Asian, Indoor Europe, Outdoor Water Level, Crazy Soul Edge Level and Star Wars) makes the novelty of each level wear off fairly quickly. Most arenas are actually based so closely off of Soul Calibur 3 arenas that they simply look like those levels from 3 got a quick graphical tweak. Levels are no more interactive than they were in 3: you can mash up the floor, break down walls to reveal new places to knock your enemy off the level and that's about it.
Cut scenes, few as they are, are animated incredibly well. Despite unrealistic, anime-like facial structures, the movements and facial expressions are spot on; no uncanny valley here. When Ivy grimaces in pain, you grimace because it actually looks like she's in pain, not because she looks like a goofy ass video game character trying to look sad.
While animations for cut scenes may be top notch, the writing is definitely not. Even ignoring the handful of grammatical errors and typos in the text that appeared on the screen (and there's a lot of it), it's safe to say that Soul Calibur 4 has some of the worst writing I have ever seen. Much of it reads like the blurbs off of fanfiction. The "story mode" (if it can even be called that) opens with a few paragraphs that talk, ramblingly, about the character. Some character's stories picked up from the middle of Soul Calibur 3 while others' stories seemed to include bits of their own SCIV endings. All in all, the "backgrounds" before starting story mode were confusing and obnoxious to read. Each ending consisted of a short cutscene which usually featured something depressing, followed by a one sentence line of text on a black screen that can essentially be summed up in this way for each character "And that's exactly what they did. The end." The story mode's plots devolved quickly from frustrating atrocities of literature into joyous adventures in hilarity as Brock and I tried to guess how utterly stupid each ending would be, and what ridiculous sentence would appear after the screen faded to black.
Despite finding brief amusement in making fun of the story, there wasn't much left for us to be impressed with. Our mains (Sophitia and Ivy) have been changed or nerfed in ways that make them a chore to handle - Sophitia is suffering once again from her "Oh shit what is 3d plane?" troubles from Soul Calibur II while Ivy's three stances have been split into five, and moves that were previously strung together to form large combos are now impossible to do in succession.
Characters like Cervantes, Mitsurugi and Kilik continue to be cheap. Yoda is surprisingly slow and difficult to handle and the apprentice (Starkiller) is the most twinky piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. At the same time though, characters like Yoshimitsu and Talim have stepped up and are playable once again; Setsuka is still incredibly difficult to handle but incredibly rewarding to play well. The guest characters like Pointie Boobs and Clockwork Girl are nothing special; their move sets are simply clones of other characters: Ashlotte is Rock and the random Kimono girl is Nightmare, for example.
The gameplay itself, however, seems to still have some game killing bugs. The largest problem I've come across is attack clipping, where attacks that should have hit the player or the CPU swing very obviously right through the character's body and do no damage. Interesting that a fighting game where the aim is to hit people with things would have a no collision feature. 8]
The AI is just as frustratingly, stupidly impossible to play against as it was in Soul Calibur 3: the CPU seems impossible to beat, until you realize it's one weakness, which is usually spamming a move like B or K over and over again. Soul Calibur 4's CPU likes to block. It likes to block a lot. One would believe this problem to be alleviated by the addition of critical finishes, but in the time it takes to whittle down an opponent's soul gauge, you've usually either already rung the opponent out or, if they have an anti-ring out skill, the time has run out and you've lost.
Skills can be assigned to characters based on how many points they have in a certain category. It's all very RPG-like, and seems, at first, to be an interesting addition, until you realize that the only way to get enough points to allocate skills is to equip certain armor onto your character. Yes, you are given the opportunity to make custom characters in Soul Calibur IV; hell, you're even given the opportunity to customize the main character's appearances! But, by the time you've unlocked most of the armor and are trying desperately to get the last few items or achievements necessary to unlock those items, all your characters are wearing the exact same armor, because there's only one or two decent sets in the game.
The amount of armor available even when you've unlocked everything is positively dwarfed by the amount of items found in Soul Calibur 3. Sure, there's extra information on the disk, but you actually have to pay to unlock it. That's right, you've just spent 60 bucks on a game and, once again, do not have full access to everything on the disk. You're expected to spend more money to unlock extra items and features like music. Honestly, this sort of thing is par for the course with next generation games: we saw it in Beautiful Katamari. What is aggravating is that the base game, itself, offers very little in the way of interesting armor.
The game's modes consist of Story (5 levels where you battle 7 to 8 people and occasionally have a team mate that you can tag into battle), Arcade (8 battles), Ascend Tower (60 floors divided into groups of 1 to 3 levels where you fight between 1 and 4 dudes on each level, frustratingly hard), Descend Tower (essentially survival) and online play. There's not much exciting to do there.
Additional museum features are severely nerfed. There's only four pieces of "special" art in the gallery this time, all featuring the bonus characters, and the rest of the art is fairly boring - the stuff we've all seen online, already. The character profiles have been limited to a simple page that looks like a FFX sphere grid; when you click on a character's picture, it gives you their profile. No more checking out each character's sound clips or watching them show off their moves or do a CPU versus battle.
Soul Calibur IV seemed unfinished; not unusual for games in this generation, apparently. In all honesty, though, even if it had felt more "finished", I still wouldn't consider actually purchasing it. As I said, we've had the game for 2 1/2 days now and we've already unlocked roughly 22 achievements (you need 30 to unlock all the armor in the game), beaten most of the Ascend tower and done story battles for every character. We've pretty much exhausted our interest in the character creator, and don't have much left to do. All in all, unimpressive. I went in with low expectations and those low expectations were met.
I leave you now with some fun facts about the game:
- In character creation, one can change the "physique" and "muscularity" of your character. For male characters, a positive physique makes you literally larger - fatter, even. For female characters, the more physique you have, the larger your breasts and ass become. 8]
- Custom female characters' armor appears to be inherently weaker than custom male character armor.
- You can blow away most of a female character's upper body armor to reveal pretty much everything but nipples, but god forbid a male character lose anything more than his shirt when you get rid of all his armor.
- Boob physics is intensely bad. Breasts appear to move independent of the body, and literally move like gelatin, flopping up and down and back and fourth with the slightest budge of the character model.
There's no doubt about it: the game is beautiful and developers did not lie when they said that you would be able to see the spots where Ivy's outfit presses into the skin. I might go as far as to say that the game is "stunning" on a high definition television, but I've already been stunned by the graphics in games like Mass Effect, Bioshock, Oblivion and Metal Gear Solid 4. Soul Calibur 4, while an amazingly beautiful game, is not as shockingly beautiful as Soul Caliburs 1 or 3 were, and, admittedly, many of the facial renders are intensely ugly. Many female characters suffer from Talim's Soul Calibur 2 cartoonish face problem.
The arenas - all, like, nine of them (keep in mind that most Soul Caliburs have had one arena for each main character, and doubles of certain arenas to reflect flooding/icing over/night and day/etc) - are beautiful, but are not distractingly beautiful like the arenas of Soul Calibur 3. A distinct lack of variety (levels come in Outdoor Asian, Indoor Europe, Outdoor Water Level, Crazy Soul Edge Level and Star Wars) makes the novelty of each level wear off fairly quickly. Most arenas are actually based so closely off of Soul Calibur 3 arenas that they simply look like those levels from 3 got a quick graphical tweak. Levels are no more interactive than they were in 3: you can mash up the floor, break down walls to reveal new places to knock your enemy off the level and that's about it.
Cut scenes, few as they are, are animated incredibly well. Despite unrealistic, anime-like facial structures, the movements and facial expressions are spot on; no uncanny valley here. When Ivy grimaces in pain, you grimace because it actually looks like she's in pain, not because she looks like a goofy ass video game character trying to look sad.
While animations for cut scenes may be top notch, the writing is definitely not. Even ignoring the handful of grammatical errors and typos in the text that appeared on the screen (and there's a lot of it), it's safe to say that Soul Calibur 4 has some of the worst writing I have ever seen. Much of it reads like the blurbs off of fanfiction. The "story mode" (if it can even be called that) opens with a few paragraphs that talk, ramblingly, about the character. Some character's stories picked up from the middle of Soul Calibur 3 while others' stories seemed to include bits of their own SCIV endings. All in all, the "backgrounds" before starting story mode were confusing and obnoxious to read. Each ending consisted of a short cutscene which usually featured something depressing, followed by a one sentence line of text on a black screen that can essentially be summed up in this way for each character "And that's exactly what they did. The end." The story mode's plots devolved quickly from frustrating atrocities of literature into joyous adventures in hilarity as Brock and I tried to guess how utterly stupid each ending would be, and what ridiculous sentence would appear after the screen faded to black.
Despite finding brief amusement in making fun of the story, there wasn't much left for us to be impressed with. Our mains (Sophitia and Ivy) have been changed or nerfed in ways that make them a chore to handle - Sophitia is suffering once again from her "Oh shit what is 3d plane?" troubles from Soul Calibur II while Ivy's three stances have been split into five, and moves that were previously strung together to form large combos are now impossible to do in succession.
Characters like Cervantes, Mitsurugi and Kilik continue to be cheap. Yoda is surprisingly slow and difficult to handle and the apprentice (Starkiller) is the most twinky piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. At the same time though, characters like Yoshimitsu and Talim have stepped up and are playable once again; Setsuka is still incredibly difficult to handle but incredibly rewarding to play well. The guest characters like Pointie Boobs and Clockwork Girl are nothing special; their move sets are simply clones of other characters: Ashlotte is Rock and the random Kimono girl is Nightmare, for example.
The gameplay itself, however, seems to still have some game killing bugs. The largest problem I've come across is attack clipping, where attacks that should have hit the player or the CPU swing very obviously right through the character's body and do no damage. Interesting that a fighting game where the aim is to hit people with things would have a no collision feature. 8]
The AI is just as frustratingly, stupidly impossible to play against as it was in Soul Calibur 3: the CPU seems impossible to beat, until you realize it's one weakness, which is usually spamming a move like B or K over and over again. Soul Calibur 4's CPU likes to block. It likes to block a lot. One would believe this problem to be alleviated by the addition of critical finishes, but in the time it takes to whittle down an opponent's soul gauge, you've usually either already rung the opponent out or, if they have an anti-ring out skill, the time has run out and you've lost.
Skills can be assigned to characters based on how many points they have in a certain category. It's all very RPG-like, and seems, at first, to be an interesting addition, until you realize that the only way to get enough points to allocate skills is to equip certain armor onto your character. Yes, you are given the opportunity to make custom characters in Soul Calibur IV; hell, you're even given the opportunity to customize the main character's appearances! But, by the time you've unlocked most of the armor and are trying desperately to get the last few items or achievements necessary to unlock those items, all your characters are wearing the exact same armor, because there's only one or two decent sets in the game.
The amount of armor available even when you've unlocked everything is positively dwarfed by the amount of items found in Soul Calibur 3. Sure, there's extra information on the disk, but you actually have to pay to unlock it. That's right, you've just spent 60 bucks on a game and, once again, do not have full access to everything on the disk. You're expected to spend more money to unlock extra items and features like music. Honestly, this sort of thing is par for the course with next generation games: we saw it in Beautiful Katamari. What is aggravating is that the base game, itself, offers very little in the way of interesting armor.
The game's modes consist of Story (5 levels where you battle 7 to 8 people and occasionally have a team mate that you can tag into battle), Arcade (8 battles), Ascend Tower (60 floors divided into groups of 1 to 3 levels where you fight between 1 and 4 dudes on each level, frustratingly hard), Descend Tower (essentially survival) and online play. There's not much exciting to do there.
Additional museum features are severely nerfed. There's only four pieces of "special" art in the gallery this time, all featuring the bonus characters, and the rest of the art is fairly boring - the stuff we've all seen online, already. The character profiles have been limited to a simple page that looks like a FFX sphere grid; when you click on a character's picture, it gives you their profile. No more checking out each character's sound clips or watching them show off their moves or do a CPU versus battle.
Soul Calibur IV seemed unfinished; not unusual for games in this generation, apparently. In all honesty, though, even if it had felt more "finished", I still wouldn't consider actually purchasing it. As I said, we've had the game for 2 1/2 days now and we've already unlocked roughly 22 achievements (you need 30 to unlock all the armor in the game), beaten most of the Ascend tower and done story battles for every character. We've pretty much exhausted our interest in the character creator, and don't have much left to do. All in all, unimpressive. I went in with low expectations and those low expectations were met.
I leave you now with some fun facts about the game:
- In character creation, one can change the "physique" and "muscularity" of your character. For male characters, a positive physique makes you literally larger - fatter, even. For female characters, the more physique you have, the larger your breasts and ass become. 8]
- Custom female characters' armor appears to be inherently weaker than custom male character armor.
- You can blow away most of a female character's upper body armor to reveal pretty much everything but nipples, but god forbid a male character lose anything more than his shirt when you get rid of all his armor.
- Boob physics is intensely bad. Breasts appear to move independent of the body, and literally move like gelatin, flopping up and down and back and fourth with the slightest budge of the character model.